


Armistice Day

by dbalthasar



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-12
Updated: 2011-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:24:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dbalthasar/pseuds/dbalthasar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All of the Five fight the Great War in their own ways.  Armistice may break them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Armistice Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



Helen keeps tabs on her boys as best she may, tracking them through the web of her connections and War Office paperwork, and is surprised to find three of them tangled in a single knot. It’s not so much that James is the spymaster, that’s only to be expected, or even that Nigel is one of his puppets, but that John is also a piece in his game. Perhaps it’s revenge, or perhaps some pressure from the War Office, or even the cold logic that says John is useful, and she does not pursue the question. She is all the more grateful for Nikola’s letters, chatty, distracting, filled with extravagant ideas and offers and occasionally rough drawings that make her hasten to burn the letters. The War Office does not need not see those plans — James does not need to see those plans — and the rest of the correspondence would only embarrass nurses already skittish about working under a woman.

It is not until the spring of 1918 that she actually encounters James, and then it is at a field hospital, the first stop behind the lines. They are overwhelmed, the result of the German offensive code-named Michael, and she is shouting to be heard above the chaos when suddenly he is there, a second surgeon. His bedside manner is possibly even worse than before, but under the circumstances no one will complain. Together they clear the worst of it, working now unspeaking except for the demands of the jobs at hand, but at last they are done and they push aside the tent flaps to breathe the dank dawn air. A night attack, and then a day in surgery, and now dawn again…. Helen can’t work out when she slept last, except that the thought of her cot, the touch of coarse sheets and wool blankets, seems more voluptuous than Nikola’s wildest fantasies. She stumbles on the rutted road, and James catches her arm to steady them both, turning them toward her tent. The ambulances are gone, except for one that has cracked a wheel. The big Ford is propped up on bricks and its American driver and a couple of the walking wounded are pounding at a replacement, their cigarettes momentarily drowning the smell of mud and blood and death.

“It can’t last,” James says. “They’ve overrun their supplies. We’ll counterattack, and by November, December at the latest, there will be a peace.”

“I can’t believe it,” she says. There can be no end to this, not that she can imagine in this moment. It will go on forever, armies advancing and retreating until the ground quakes and swallows them all, until the ending of the world…. The mud tugs at her heavy shoes, and she can hear the rumble of guns at the front. She cocks her head, breath catching in her throat, and James shakes his head.

“Just the morning hate,” he says, and she nods, hearing the same familiar pattern. Only the morning bombardment, not another attack, and the knowledge steadies her. No, not even this will last forever.

“I haven’t had a chance to thank you yet,” she says. A line of stretcher-bearers overtakes them with a muted call of warning, and they split to let them pass, then rejoin in the rising light. “Or to ask where the hell you came from.”

He smiles then — she suspects he resorted to cocaine sometime in the night, the physician’s helper, but she doesn’t really want to know. “I’m stationed nearby, at least temporarily. I’m to run my agents from here, it seems.”

That makes some practical sense, though she can’t think of any surviving buildings that would be suitable for intelligence operations — or, really, any buildings at all that are more than a wall and rubble. “You came in very handy last night.”

“Thank you.”

He is too tired to be smug: ironic, she thinks, when for once he has earned the right. And perhaps this means Nigel will be here, or even John. She is too worn out to deal with that, with her feelings or any other ramifications of their presence, and she settles on the one thing that does matter. “Can I call on you again, if we need surgeons?”

He nods. “Of course. We’re in the big dugout in the old support line.”

“We?” She wishes immediately that she hadn’t asked, but James seems to think nothing of it.

“My assistant — my telegrapher — Sergeant Andrews. He’s a good lad.”

Not John, then. She nods back, her shoes dragging, and James offers his arm, as though they were students still at Oxford. She takes it, lets him lead her back to her tent. She embraces him at the door, not caring if watching eyes censure it as a more than fraternal embrace, and lets herself fall fully dressed onto her cot.

 

James is recruited for Intelligence early on, but he volunteers for the front as soon as he realizes he does not understand what his agents are telling him. Not the words, but the nuances, the emotions, the fears and nightmares, all of which he must fully comprehend if he is to make full use of their reports. Once he is there, he knows he’s chosen correctly, though the unspeakable waste and filth are almost unbearable for a man as fastidious as a cat: no one who has not been there, seen and heard the shelling, smelled and tasted this war, can hope to judge its course correctly. Within a year he sits in a repaired dugout at the front and rests his cup on a man’s femur that protrudes between the bracing boards like a shelf. German, English, French; it’s impossible to tell which, and at that particular moment the question is only idle. He’s just grateful to have a place to put his tea.

He wangles control of the special service, which means John and Nigel and a handful of others, puts them to use while he stands between them and authority, makes arrangements for them to disappear as the war wanes and it is clear it is only a matter of weeks before Germany surrenders. After Second Cambrai, the Hindenburg Line is finally broken, and it’s time for Nigel to leave before any of his sins come home to roost. They sit in another dugout, this one in the support trenches, floored with decent duckboards and equipped with a proper table and stools and a bunk that no one wants to use carved into the wall like a sideways grave. Sergeant Andrews makes them tea and then disappears to run another set of the telephone wires that will connect them to headquarters.

“Major Watson,” Nigel says. He’s made corporal three times that James knows of, and been broken back to private each time. “Why are people in your job always majors?”

“Because —” James shakes his head. “I doubt you actually want to know.”

“Not really,” Nigel says. “Though I’m more worried about that Major Searce. I don’t suppose anyone’s killed him?”

“No such luck.” James adds a tot of brandy to each of their cups, though it’s a mixture he’s always deplored. “And not likely to, either. He’s been sent back to HQ.”

“Pity.”

“You didn’t have to tell him to his face he was an idiot,” James says. That’s the mildest thing Nigel called the man, and all of it deserved, but James knows there are questions and orders for detention working their way back up the lines. If they’re unlucky, it will be ‘desertion’ and ‘shoot on sight.’

“Oh, that wouldn’t have been so bad,” Nigel says, and wraps both hands around the cup. “It was disappearing out of his nice cozy lock-up that really irritated him.”

Probably true, James admits. “We should get you back to England as soon as possible. Though that won’t stop the army looking for you….”

“I was thinking America,” Nigel says. “I thought I’d look up Tesla, see how he’s getting on.”

“Rob a bank or three?” James smiles to show he doesn’t care.

“If I have to,” Nigel says. “But I was hoping you and Helen might stake me.”

“It can probably be arranged.”

The money is actually the easy part; the hard part is finding a name and an excuse under which to send him home. At last James turns to Helen, arriving on her doorstep in a battered Peugeot. It is a quiet night, by field hospital standards; he assists on a couple of cases, and then the two of them retreat to Helen’s tent.

“Nigel needs papers,” he says bluntly. “And they can’t come from me.”

“And how am I supposed to provide them?” Helen demands. “James, if you can’t do it, with your connections —” She stops, realizing, and shakes her head. “Oh, no. No, I will not create a mix-up in the records. Think what it will do to the family, hearing that their boy is wounded but alive, and then finding out he was dead all along. I won’t do it.”

“It’s no different for them than if he died in hospital,” James says. He already has his eye on the right body, an older, nondescript man from a Pals’ Battalion. Most of his comrades are already dead, and the survivors have been dispersed among other units. She opens her mouth to protest, and he fixes her with a stare. “Helen. It’s for Nigel.”

She draws a long breath, and starts to her feet, pushes through the tent flaps without a word. He does not move, does not touch his tea, sits digging one fingernail into the rotting wood of the table until the tent flaps open and she tosses the bundle of documents down in front of him. They are the ones he would have chosen, the man from the Pals’ Battalion, but he knows better than to say so.

“This bloody war,” she says, and he lets out the breath he didn’t realize he was holding.

 

John knows his utility in wartime, particularly in the already grotesque nightmare that is this war. He is the ghost of the trenches, the one who brings death of a decidedly personal sort, bodies eviscerated not by shells but by a knife or bayonet wielded with loving care, left pinned to the walls of dugout and trench like dirty butterflies, and if he uses his talents now and then to shield Abnormals, James approves and HQ will never know.

All the killing has left him surprisingly lucid, very much the opposite of what he had anticipated, though James claims to have expected it. _After all, you were convincingly normal when it began_ , he says, sitting in a redoubt somewhere west of Amiens, passing a flask of brandy between them while James’s signals sergeant — Sean Andrews, handsome in a way that is just to James’s taste — sets up his field telephone and huddles at the opposite end of the pit, trying to raise HQ to pass on John’s report. That’s as close as James is going to get to saying what he means, which John thinks is really _you were sane enough that you fooled me_ , and probably it’s for the best that they don’t discuss it in any more detail. Four years of war have taught them both what human beings will and can do to each other, both face to face and en masse, but the Whitechapel dead are still better not spoken of.

For a while, he works with Nigel, bringing him to points where he can steal the vital intelligence. John disappears to sow confusion in the trenches, returns in time to snatch Nigel away and bring them both back to the relative safety of their own lines. During Michael, that’s a problem, the Allies retreating so fast that twice he drops them into trenches that were British-held in the morning and by nightfall swarm not just with Germans but with their second-line troops. They fight their way free both times, and the second time Nigel resigns on the spot, shouting obscenities at the major as he strips off preparatory to going invsible, and it’s only James’s intervention that prevents a court martial.

After that, though, Nigel is assigned to another sector, and it’s just him and James, although in truth James is responsible for a dozen or so scouts and spies, most of them Abnormal volunteers. Once Michael peters out, and the counteroffensive begins, there’s little for them to do: James declares this to be the endgame, and John can only agree. There are still deaths to come, but fewer at his hands.

Which is how he finds himself near Amiens again, just as the ninth of November becomes the tenth, appearing in a flash of smoke at the door of James’s dugout. Something is different from the last time, he sees that before he registers that Andrews is gone, and then James is putting away his trophy Luger, and beckons him into the lamplight. He looks terrible, John thinks, worn to the bone, but John says only, “Am I too late for tea?”

James gives a flicker of a smile, waves him to the sturdier of the packing cases he’s using for chairs. The camp stove is in fact lit, and it’s the work of moments to set the kettle boiling. James finds the packet of tea, bright paper over golden foil, incongruous amid the browns and dirty greens, and produces an equally unlikely teapot. It’s chipped, the lid badly mended, but it is china, flowered, and utterly English. The cups are tin, and Army issue.

“Sean — Andrews is dead,” James says, and fills the teapot.

“Ah.”

“Sniper, three days ago. Utterly pointless.”

“Yes.” Not the first nor yet the last, but there’s no use saying it, and instead John stretches his legs until his toes touch the dugout’s opposite wall. “I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well.”

John has known him too long to be deceived by the apparent annoyance; he also knows better than to offer any direct comfort. He offers silence instead, the undemanding presence that made Nikola call him Helen’s lapdog, and James collects himself and pours the tea.

“Helen’s here,” he says, and for a moment John thinks somehow James read his thoughts. And then it sinks in, a simple statement of fact, and James goes on unheeding. “I thought you ought to know.”

“Why?” John says, and shakes his head. “Why is she here?”

James exhales softly, clearly glad to avoid the other question. “She’s the head surgeon at the field hospital up the road. I’ve been helping her when my own duties aren’t too pressing.”

“The other surgeons must like that.” John sips his tea, unexpectedly good, and James rummages in an ammunition box to come up with the end of a packet of biscuits.

“She’s raised a few hackles,” James admits, and doles out the biscuits as though they were still in school. “But her patients tend to live. The men love her.”

And that’s Helen, John thinks. He rests his back against the boards and dirt that are the wall, the damp not yet seeping through his uniform jacket. She’d wrestle death every day if it meant one more man brought living out of the mud. That’s why he shouldn’t stay, shouldn’t tempt her to try again with him, but there is James to think of, too, or so he tells himself. He reaches into his pockets, avoiding the trench knife, and produces a battered flask that, when he shakes it, gives a solidly liquid sound.

“Brandy?” he asks, and James nods once, sharply, as though against his will. But he takes it anyway, and when the tea is cold John takes him to bed.

 

It is the morning of the eleventh, and Helen is writing up her notes when something changes. For a long moment, she can’t tell what it is, and then she understands. The guns have fallen silent, all of them, not a mere pause, but an actual and almost palpable silence. It has been minutes since she heard them fire. She puts down her pen and goes to the entrance of her tent, raises the flap to peer out into the clearing day. Across what passes for a road, a good-looking dark-haired boy in an American uniform offers her a startled, wincing smile. A pilot, she remembers, caught in a mortar attack on the way back to his unit. She remembers stitching the cut on his shoulder, but his face was a blur. It’s a nice face, she sees now, badly shaven — though she suspects he’s the sort who needs to shave twice a day to look presentable — and his brown eyes are wide and wondering.

“The Armistice,” he says.

Helen nods. It feels unreal, impossible that it could all just… stop.

“HQ confirmed it,” someone else says, a sharp voice that makes her think of Nigel. “It’s over.”

The rest of it fades into babble, and she stands frozen with her hand still on the tent flap. They have survived, the Five, all five of them — and without volition she begins to walk, and then to run, heedless of the mud that spatters her stockings and the hem of her white coat. James will know for certain, will tell her that they all live.

She slows abruptly as she nears the old line of trenches, catches her breath and smooths her skirt. She is Helen Magnus, and they are hers; she has the right to know their fates. Ahead, the approach road begins to sink, burrowing toward the now-abandoned trenches. She carries on, the earth rising to either side, stepping carefully now on fresh-cut duckboards. She makes the sharp left turn that leads to James’s dugout, and comes face to face with the answer to her question. He’s cut his hair short, conventional and military, and he’s in uniform, corporal’s stripes on his sleeves, but anyone with half an eye can see he’s not… safe.

“Darling,” he says, and stops as though the word burned his tongue. It’s that look, that flicker of pain, that makes her sure he was serious, that this is not the bitter mockery of their last meeting. And then she sees James behind him, unshaven, dressed in nothing but his uniform trousers and a khaki undershirt. His expression goes from unguarded to severe in an instant, and two spots of color flare on his sallow cheeks.

“Helen,” James says.

She knows precisely what they’ve been up to, what she’s interrupted — what she’s taking from him — but she has been practicing gracious victory for a long time. “It’s happened,” she says. “The Armistice.”

James fishes in his pocket for his watch. “So it has.”

“And the guns have stopped,” John says. “I don’t know that I really thought they would.”

He looks younger than the last time, somehow, and more stable; the wry smile is one he wore at Oxford when James and Nikola indulged in battle royal. Helen takes a breath. “I wanted to know —” And she stops again, because what she wanted was to know that all of them were safe and sound, and the only one of whom she was not sure was John.

“I’ve a tin of sausages,” James says, and she sees with surprise that he can be gracious, too. “And tea.”

“We can do better than that for Helen,” John says, and vanishes in a curl of smoke.

“James?” Helen asks.

He shrugs as if to say he has no idea. “Come in. We’ll find out soon enough.”

She follows him into the dugout, relieved to see that it is dry and smells of clean earth. Instead of a cot, there is a nest of blankets on a straw mattress, big enough for two, and a folding table and stools made of packing cases. James lights the second lamp, driving back the shadows, and crouches to light the battered camp stove. He rummages for tins and an opener, hands them to her to manage, and finds a dented pan. She concentrates on cutting through the lids, and when she’s done, he empties them recklessly into the pan. The tins were rations for days, could have stretched to a week, but there’s no point in saving them now.

“I may have another plate,” James says, “or we could use the tins —”

The air curls again, and John appears in its midst, two bottles of champagne in each hand and a cloth-wrapped bundle in the crook of his arm. “Take it, quick,” he says.

Helen catches it before it falls, feeling glasses and saucers and some lumps that, when she unwraps the checked cloth, prove to be half a loaf of bread and a round of cheddar. She sets them wordlessly on the table, and James picks up a glass.

“Where the devil did you get this?”

“Battalion HQ,” John answers. “Don’t worry, they won’t miss it, not with the spread they’ve got laid on.”

He opens the first bottle of champagne for punctuation, and James seizes a glass to catch the spilling foam. He is smiling, smirking even, happier than Helen remembers seeing for a very long time. This is the moment that she should walk away, because she cannot and does not forgive, but they are also all alive, and John is so very much like himself that she decides she will let herself pretend, just for this moment. James is watching her, reading every thought in the shift of her muscles. John sees it, too, though not as clearly, and she reaches for the other glass. John fills it, and the last for himself, and they touch bowl to bowl, the crystal chiming like bells.

“To the Armistice,” Helen says.

 

James turns the sausages carefully, as though preserving them unburned and unsplit will preserve the fragile camaraderie. He is not by any stretch of the imagination a good cook — John, of all of them, is the one you can rely on for that — but he has learned to substitute attention for skill. He scrapes unbroken sausages and crusted beans onto the Limoges plates, accepts a fork from Helen and another glass of champagne from John, and by one accord they take their plates out into the trench itself. The sky shows scraps of blue above them, though there are still no birds to sing. It has been a long time since he’s had wine at midday, and it and the unlikely quiet go straight to his head. He sits on the duckboards with his back against the timbered wall, empty plate beside him and a full glass in his hand, watching the others. Helen has brought out one of the stools, eats with her plate balanced on her knee; as he watches, she sets it carefully aside, and accepts another glass of champagne. There is mud on her shoes and splashed on her stockings; the hem of her sensible skirt is coming down on one side. Her once-neat bob has grown inconveniently, and she brushes a few fair strands impatiently behind her ear.

John is watching her, too, with an expression that is both hungry and regretful. James suspects there is much the same expression on his own face when he looks at John, and schools himself to impassivity. He is very aware of the nest of blankets in the dugout. It isn’t safe, is the very opposite of safe, but that has never stopped any of the Five. Though logically they would want to control John…. The image rises unbidden, stiffening his flesh: John pinned to the bed, Helen astride him, head flung back and hair in wild disorder, himself free to caress her as he pleases, to demand whatever services he wants from John. He moistens dry lips, unable to blot out the image, and John smiles slowly. He is half hard, too, James sees, and Helen is faintly flushed, whether from champagne or her own unruly thoughts James can’t be sure.

“We could adjourn,” he says, and John shakes his head. James barely has time to recognize what he means and to seize the unopened bottle, and then John has reached across to grab both their shoulders and they are falling all together, tumbling onto sand amid the sudden smell of the sea. James picks himself up, glad to see that the champagne has survived, brushes sand and seaweed ostentatiously from his clothes. He’s still only half dressed, and he’s glad to see that the beach is empty, a tumble-down cottage on the headland the only sign of human presence.

“Oh, John,” Helen says, and there are emotions in her voice that James cannot read.

“Yes, I know,” John says. His mood has changed, darkened, and Helen glares. “I promised you poetry by the sea, did I not?”

“It’s a bit late for that,” Helen says.

“It’s what I have,” John says. “It’s all I have.”

“I don’t forgive you,” Helen says.

“I never thought you would.”

“You don’t deserve it.”

“No.”

James turns away, not wanting to see the expression on John’s face, and Helen calls after him.

“And you, James. How could you?”

 _Because he was useful, and I could keep an eye on him, and he was mine first_. James swings back to face them, and his foot turns in the loose sand. He drops his glass, but it lands without breaking, and he swallows his first answer. “Because there was a bloody war on!”

There is silence then, just the hiss of the waves and the faint high shriek of a gull. They are at the deepest part of the little bay, and a fishing boat, lugger sail spread, is just emerging from behind the headland. The air is cool, rich with salt and seaweed; the tide has turned, and the waves creep up the dull shingle.

“The war is over,” Helen says.

“Is it?” John’s voice is bleak.

 _Never_. It trembles on her lips, but James speaks first. “A truce,” he says. “An armistice.” He had not meant to plead.

Helen sucks in her breath as though she can’t decide whether she’s been betrayed or saved. John turns to look at him, the lift of his eyebrow and the curl of his lip making his question clear. But this is not a new discussion between them, and James holds his gaze, implacable, until at last John relaxes, the predator retreating.

“Carpe diem,” he says.

James stoops to pick up the glass, and John offers his hand to steady him.

“Just like that?” Helen asks, no longer indignant, but considering. Let her be on the outside for once, he thinks, and the shame of it warms his face.

“For today, yes,” he answers, and lets John take his weight until he straightens.

“Well, then,” she says, and when John holds out his other hand, she takes it.

The cottage smells stale, and mice have nested in the settee, but the bedroom has seen more care. And recent use, James thinks, one of John’s boltholes, for when the war was too much — or when he needed other prey? No, this room has never seen the kind of bloodshed John unleashes at his worst, and the war kept him sated, anyway.

Helen seats herself on the end of the bed, crossing her ankles neatly, and John bows to her.

“And how may we please the lady?”

“The lady would like to watch the gentlemen for a while,” she says calmly.

It’s a challenge, and she means it. John smiles just a little, and James takes him by the collar of his uniform and draws him in for a thorough kiss. John returns the favor, and by the time they break apart, gasping, John’s shirt is open to the waist and James has lost his undershirt. Helen’s face is flushed, her expression eager; one hand is flattened against her thigh, the other is inside her blouse, fingers circling a nipple. She smiles to see them watching, but shakes her head.

“Carry on, gentlemen.”

There is a moment’s pause. John lifts his eyebrow again and James stares back, and then John goes gracefully to his knees, undoing James’s trouser buttons one by one. James catches his breath as John frees his erection, hears Helen gasp as though it was John’s mouth on her flesh, bites his lip hard to keep from making any sound. John manages a choked laugh, and James sways for an instant, almost undone. He stiffens his knees and then, because he wants so much to continue, tugs at John’s hair, pulling him away. John sits back on his heels, licking his lips, and James has to clear his throat before he can speak.

“We should look to the lady.”

John turns his head, smiling. “Well, Helen?”

“Yes,” she says, and scoots back on the bed, kicking her shoes off as she goes. They peel her clothes off her as though they’d practiced it, shirt and skirt and camiknickers, leaving her at last naked except for the muddied cotton stockings. John runs a finger under the top of one and Helen makes a gratifying noise, but James shakes his head.

“Leave them,” he says, and John nods.

“They are pretty on her.” He pauses. “You have something in mind.”

“I do,” James says, and shifts so that he’s behind Helen. He urges her up and back so that she’s on her knees, stockinged legs spread, his erection pressing against the curve of her buttocks. He reaches around to cup her breasts, filling each hand, pulls her harder against his chest. This time it’s John who gasps as Helen moans, and James bends his face against her hair, struggling for control.

“Can you?” he manages, and feels her nod.

“Yes,” John says. He strokes her, thumbs on the creases of her thighs, fingers busy on labia and clitoris. Helen lets her head fall against James’s shoulder as he finally enters her, not perfect but enough for now. They rock back and forth, her hips grinding against them both, and then John pulls back, drawing Helen with him so that she straddles him. James reaches for himself, strokes hard as Helen leans forward, riding John hard, her body bent to display the perfect violin-curve of back and hips. He comes at the sight, at John’s knowing look, spattering them both, and then John is pushing her away, his eyes closing as he reaches for his own climax. Helen hangs there a moment longer, rocking on her knees, her hand between her thighs, and then she folds forward, gasping, hips jerking, subsides finally against John’s side. James shivers, a simple aftershock, but they pull apart, and Helen draws him down between them, pressing him into their warmth. John’s arms go around him, and Helen’s leg still in its stocking rests against his hip, and though he knows better he closes his eyes and clings to them both.

 

John leaves the others still in bed, perhaps asleep or drowsing or at least pretending, makes his way down the path to the beach. The tide is just past full, leaving just a narrow strip of shingle at the base of the headland; he picks his way along the hardest sand, where the largest waves just lick at the soles of his shoes. His shirt rubs against scratches on his back, Helen’s nails or James’s, he isn’t entirely sure which, but a memory to savor nonetheless. They will feel him tomorrow, too, and he is glad of it, because by then he will be gone.

When he came here during the war, snatching a moment’s respite when he couldn’t bear the trenches any longer, he could still hear the guns when the wind was out of the east. The wind is from the east now, steady on his upturned face, but the only sound is the beating of the sea. There is a haze on the ocean, blurring the horizon; a few gulls circle in the middle distance, but the fishermen are long gone. He stands in shadow, the sun dipping into the hills behind him, the sand cold underfoot. He can feel the rage stirring in him, the first delicate prickles of something that he can only call hunger. He hasn’t been as busy these last few months, and the rage has not been as well fed as it is used to. He has a week or two, he thinks; three at the outside, but that third week will be crowded with dreams of blood and the constant struggle not to act. Better to leave well before he gets to that point, and let their last memories of him be of Armistice Day.

Except it won’t be the last memory, of course. When he kills again, James will return to the hunt, and Helen, too, and while there is a certain savage pleasure in that dance of death and pursuit, it’s not really what any of them had planned. At one point, he had dreamed of teaching, James at his side, later of the law, and Helen, and a cottage by the sea, and now there is only the search for a place to kill….

He could end it, always. There is ocean enough to drown him — even the center of the Channel would be enough, if he launched himself fully clothed into those distant waters. But the world is still curious and strangely beautiful, and there are days like this, unexpected, undeserved benediction. He will not drown himself today.

Something moves in the corner of his vision, and he turns to see Helen and James picking their way down the narrow path. Helen has her shoes and stockings in her hand as though it’s summer, and her hair is still in glorious disarray. James follows more cautiously, his movements for once heavy, eyes watchful to be sure she doesn’t fall. John thinks, watching them, that if he has pushed them together he will have done something worthwhile. And it might work. Now that Helen has seen the fire of which James is capable, she will be unable to resist playing with it, and if any woman could hold James Watson’s attention, it would be his nearest equal. They are not so badly matched in bed as all that. Not badly matched at all, in fact, and his mouth curves in a reminiscent smile. Of course, the two of them together will never be entirely free of him, and, while he cannot honestly regret that, it makes his sacrifice less worthy.

“You’re leaving,” James says, studying him. “When?”

For an instant, John thinks of denying it, but the lie would be pointless. James knows him too well. “Soon.”

“Where will you go?” Helen lifts her hand as though to touch his shoulder, lets it fall again. She does not ask what he will do.

“I can’t tell you that.” John carefully doesn’t meet James’s eyes. James will always be able to find him, if he chooses.

“It doesn’t really matter,” James says, and John dips his head in agreement.

“I’ll take us back,” he says. The day has waned with the tide; there will be work for Dr. Magnus still, and Major Watson, and even for himself, the world spinning on without them. James holds out his hand at once, though his expression is anything but eager. Helen glances back at the cottage, the headland now in shadow, and he sees her take a breath before she takes his hand.


End file.
